The Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton, Ohio is collecting food for employees who can’t afford Thanksgiving dinner. “This store has been doing this for several years and (the food) is for associates that have faced an extreme hardship recently,” Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg told Business Insider. Meanwhile, Walmart turned a profit of $15.7 billion […]

Increasingly ad agencies are incubating high tech startups under their hood. It’s a way to stay close to the action, and to see first-hand how products and companies are born. It’s also a new business strategy, as the companies being born could become clients someday. The agency might also help fund and advise the company. […]

Advertising prima donnas are such pricks. Here are two unrelated situations that support my premise… First, there’s a new study from consultancy Hoyt & Co. and marketing magazine The Hub that points to some serious cluelessness. According to Media Daily News, Hoyt and Hub polled 30 major marketers, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark and […]

Are you tired of hearing about shopper marketing? Or no, maybe you are still wondering what the hell “shopper marketing” is? It’s two words for retail, instead of one. Stuart Elliott calls shopper marketing “one of the hottest fields in advertising” in his piece on Team Enterprises, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Team Enterprises is […]

Shopper marketing is serious business. Unfortunately, it can also be devious and manipulative. According to The Wall Street Journal, retailers invent shopping seasons to drive traffic to the store and increase ticket size per shopper. A key goal of these seasonal pitches is to get people to buy impulsively, something they do less of these […]

Finally, a good reason to check in on Foursquare… On the corner of Broadway and East 4th Street in Manhattan, site of the MLB Fan Cave, a custom-built vending machine dispenses official MLB baseballs when people check in to “THE FRANCHISE on SHOWTIME” via Foursquare. A few lucky participants will receive autographed baseballs from the […]

IBM is using its information technology and consulting prowess to get into the marketing services business. According to Ad Age, IBM’s “Smarter Commerce” initiative links its 2010 acquisitions Coremetrics, a web-analytics firm; Unica, an interactive-campaign-management firm; and Sterling Commerce, a retail-systems and analytics company in a rollup of web analytics, consumer behavioral data, store data […]

Convinced there are not enough screens in the world, a company called Automated Media Services is set to introduce 3GTV at retail, in hopes that shoppers can be further swayed at the ever critical point of sale. One of the firm’s advisers, Burt Manning, formerly of JWT, told The New York Times, “People are still […]

Overall investment in shopper marketing — defined by the Marketing Leadership Council as in-store advertising, promotion and design initiatives intended to extend brand equity and provide the retailer with differentiation — is estimated to be growing at 21% annually. In other words, it’s a rising force. Here’s why: Shoppers choose 59% of the brands they […]